Jesus Christ!!! Can't these ebayers break the description of their products into discrete paragraphs. Man, everytime somebody writes like that, there occurs a great disturbance in the Force...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

The street argument is retarded. BJJ is so much overkill for the street that its ridiculous. Unless you're the idiot that picks a fight with the high school wrestling team, barring knife or gun play, the opponent shouldn't make it past double leg + ground and pound - Osiris

"Damascus" steel is usually not Damascus steel. Even if it is real Damascus steel, it wasn't made in Damascus. As far as I know, there's never been a smith making Damascus who actually worked in the city of Damascus.

That confusing enough?

What you need to know to understand Damascus is two basic facts:

1. What we usually call "Damascus" today is actually better named "Pattern-Welded Steel."

2. Real "Damascus Steel" is something much harder to make; its real name is "Wootz."

Now that you know that, here's the story:
Wootz: A way of making carbon steel by putting iron into a crucible and heating it in a blast furnace. Organic matter (stuff like bones and tree leaves, no joke) is added to the crucible and the process results in very, VERY strong steel of legendary toughness. Because of the way the carbon is absorbed, Wootz steel has beautiful swirling patterns that look like some kind of etching. It wasn't prized for the looks but for the toughness of the steel; it made great weapons back when bladed weapons were the order of the day.
However, it was made only by a few smiths in the orient ("Wootz" was, I think, an Indian name) and these guarded the secrets of making Wootz jealously. Nobody outside a very small area could make the stuff, and believe me, European bladesmiths tried and tried. Western traders bought Wootz in Damascus, then the trade center of Europe, Asia and Africa, so Europeans called it "Damascus steel." In time, not enough smiths learned the Wootz process and it died out. For the last couple hundred years, Wootz has been known, but the way of making it was a true lost art. No living human being knew how to make Wootz.
Only a few years ago, Al Pendray, a Florida metalsmith, finally succeeded in making Wootz. Now you can buy new-made Wootz by the ingot, but it ain't cheap.

Now, what we commonly refer to as Damascus today is actually pattern-welded steel, which is a lot less difficult to make. Even I've done it. . . . badly. Long ago Northern Europeans would take different steels or steel and iron and weld bits together into one billet. Then the billet could be forged into a blade with the best qualities of both steels. The Japanese tamahagane folded steel that Asiaphiles love to prattle about is actually a form of pattern-welded steel; the Japanese used it because the steel they could make from iron sands was full of impurities which would be evened out with all the folding and pattern-welding.

Anyway, pattern-welding leaves a really cool pattern in the steel, and although it doesn't really look like Wootz most of the time, it was close enough in most eyes to be called Damascus. It's not really that useful anymore since modern steels are better than anything you can create by pattern-welding, but it's beautiful and intriguing stuff. Nice to own.